Christine Taylor

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As a key point about big data storage, how’s this for a Captain Obvious statement: data is getting bigger. Storage vendors have swung into action to make their systems more scalable, aggregated, faster. This is particularly true for the biggest big data of them all, massive amounts of information whose competitive value requires large-scale analytics. […]

Big data definitions shift over time. When it first came into vogue, one of the definitions was simply a lot of data residing on primary systems. An updated definition is large data stores and/or datasets that are subject to active business processes like analytics. Now a growing subclass of big data is shifting the definition […]

Tiered storage is the process of assigning progressively less-expensive storage categories to progressively less-valuable data. It’s up to IT to classify storage tiers using a matrix of performance, price (Capex and Opex), storage capacity and data services. Classifying data priority is not entirely up to IT. Within the same storage system, automated tiering functions will […]

Hyperconverged systems fully integrate compute, networking, server virtualization, storage, data deduplication/compression and storage virtualization across entire distributed systems. Some hyperconverged products also converge data protection, yet hyperconvergence remains primarily a data center and production environment play. It’s an increasingly popular one. In a recent Taneja Group survey, more than 25 percent of enterprise IT directors […]

When it comes to public cloud compliance, different regulations exist for different industries. To be sure, public cloud compliance is a thicket of complication, effected by myriad legislation. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the granddaddy of healthcare-related legislation that relates to public cloud compliance. Payment Card Industry Data Security […]

When I started to write this article, I expected to launch immediately into innovative products and vendors because innovation, like adventure, is out there. But the deeper I got, the more I realized that innovation is very much in the eye of the beholder, and I was going to have to define my terms and […]

Data corruption is simply an unintentional change to a bit. An occasional bad bit or unrecoverable read error is unlikely to take down an application or render a restore useless. However, corrupted data is not uncommon. When data corruption goes undetected, it becomes silent data corruption and is a high risk for applications. And when […]

As everyone who does not live under a rock knows by now, Dell and EMC have signed a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire EMC. The deal is multi-billions of dollars ($67 billion to be exact). Privately owned Dell is rich but not that rich, so Michael Dell partnered with MSD Partners and Silver Lake […]

In basic terms, cloud gateways translate block or file commands to the cloud via REST or SOAP APIs. They may be physical or virtual appliances, and in some cases, they are storage systems. Specific offerings vary. Some gateways are primarily caching mechanisms to speed up data transfers. Cloud gateways scale up the business food chain […]

The definition of VVOLs is simple but the effect is ground-breaking. Here is the simple definition part: Virtual Volumes (VVOL) is an out-of-band communication protocol between array-based storage services and vSphere 6. And here is the ground-breaking part: VVOLs enables a VM to communicate its data management requirements directly to the storage array. The idea […]

Many computing operations throw off lots of copies: prime offenders include backup, analytics, snapshots, cloning, and test/dev. And not only do you have many copies by many processes, each of these copies is proprietary to its generating application. It is not possible to re-use that data for multiple processes, leaving your storage landscape littered with […]